The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

In one experiment, teams of people wandered through several Seattle neighborhoods, including the University of Washington campus, wearing different sorts of masks. One type of mask in each group of people represented the “dangerous” mask (on campus, it was a caveman mask). The people wearing the dangerous mask captured several wild crows. The other people, sporting “neutral” masks or no masks at all, just meandered along harmlessly. Nine years later, the masked scientists returned to the scene of the crime. The crows in these neighborhoods—including those that weren’t even hatched at the time of the capture—reacted to the people with the dangerous masks as if they were a threat, dive-bombing, scolding, and mobbing them.